This is such a touchy subject I find it difficult to articulate what society actually needs. We need a system where PEDOPHILES are able to receive the mental health they need before they become MOLESTERS.
But any time you say something about helping someone who is attracted to children the knee jerk reaction is always like “kill them. What you don’t want them dead? Are YOU a pedophile?” And I end up unable to convince them that helping them to not molest children by treating their mental health condition will actually help children not be molested. I really feel like this reactionary public opinion is causing people to go underground and is actually causing more children to be harmed.
Agreed.
There’s a world of difference between socially inappropriate desires that someone might be born with and can’t help and inappropriate behaviors that they chose to do.
By all means demonize the latter. But demonizing the former along with it does mean a likely increase in the latter by forcing a social climate where being open and transparent about the former to avoid the latter is far less common.
People suck even dealing with people being alcoholics or drug addicts and giving them the space and situational consideration to avoid temptation.
All that said, IIRC the numbers are something like 50% of people with a sexual attraction to children will have acted on it by college, so it’s understandable that the animosity for the former is often not far distanced from the latter.
But I’m all for any social programs that provide support for helping the other 50% avoid going down that path.
It’s impossible to talk about any kind of numbers or statistics regarding sexually attraction to minors. It all gets muddled up really fast. A lot of men normalize underage attraction to teenagers, but don’t consider it pedophilia (legally it is). Which brings up the question of classifying attraction, but in public speech this of course brings in the knee jerks reaction of questioning and attacking the person for knowing or addressing that there’s a qualitative different between attraction to a 5 year old and a 17 year old. But it does make statistics really hard to define.
Plus most of the information we have comes from felons and convicted criminals which are the worst or most extreme examples. Non-molesters pedophiles have absolutely no incentive to tell anyone, not even their psychologists, which means we don’t know anything from them. A few researchers try to get into their world and derive some understanding, but it is always a hard sell for grants. But a friend researcher once told me, if we could only interview felons, we would be convinced that most people will murder someone before turning 30. The truth is we don’t know, and we currently have no way of knowing the real numbers regarding pedophilia.
‘Pedophilia’ has no legal definition.
And the psychiatric definition is attraction to pre-pubescent children.
And the statistics aren’t actually as hard to define as you might think, though the amount of research this topic gets is woefully underrepresented relative to the social impact.
For example, on the topic of violent offenders in prison you bought up:
Of the 100 male inmates who participated in this study, 59% reported experiencing some form of sexual abuse before puberty, and all such instances occurred before or at the age of 13 years.
This issue has a much bigger and broader impact on society than most people realize.
